Month: January 2025

And As Long As We Are Talking About Doing The Right Things For (Perhaps) the Wrong Reasons: Zuckerberg and Meta

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and its alter-ego Meta’s chief executive, announced that his flagship social media platform, along with Instagram and Threads, will end its longstanding (and biased, and flawed) fact-checking program, moving instead to a “community notes” system like the one employed by Elon Musk’s reinvention of Twitter.

Good. What took so long?

“It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression,” Zuckerberg said. The company’s current fact-checking system had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.” “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

In truth, anyone should have been able to figure out that Facebook’s “fact checkers” were progressive, dishonest, partisan hacks. The censors included Snopes (EA dossier here) and PolitiFact (even worse dossier here), which Ethics Alarms, among many others, had marked as biased and untrustworthy years ago, indeed well before Facebook turned to them as censors. The truth is that one person’s “bad stuff” is another’s stimulating opinion or analysis. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept, but in the Age of the Great Stupid, it is. The 21st Century Left likes censorship, indeed has relied on it to hold power, and has embraced the practice on college campuses, social media, and in the news. Sad but true.

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Now THIS Is Trump Derangement…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Maybe it would be therapeutic for January 6 to be officially declared “Trump Derangement Victims Day,” in honor of all the otherwise sane and reasonable Americans who were driven to fear, loathing and madness by the very exitsnace of Donald J. Trump. The villains who spread this destructive contagion are too many to list, although our lame duck, dying brain POTUS just awarded several of them citizen honors. Meanwhile, if we had such a holiday, those unfortunate sufferers could use the day therapeutically, and let all of their hate out like a primal scream.

I came to this conclusion after reading the following yesterday on a legal blog that I usually admire:

“There are arguments to be made that many who participated in the insurrection of January 6, 2021 thought they were being patriots defending a nation from a stolen election, even though it was a nonsensical lie fed to the willingly delusional by an amoral narcissist who wasn’t strong enough to endure the humiliation of failure. There are arguments to be made that some sentences imposed on J6 insurrectionists were excessive, even though capital police were beaten and bloodied. But there are no arguments that January 6th didn’t happen as it was seen, experienced and suffered that day, as Trump gleefully watched. Yet here we are, Trump re-elected and promising to pardon or grant clemency to his Hallelujah chorus. Here we are, Trump re-elected and urging the jailing of the January 6th House commission for prosecuting him too well, pretending that most of his own administration’s testimony against him didn’t exist or was somehow the result of tampering by then-Congresswoman Liz Cheney, of the radically progressive Cheney clan. Here we are, Trump re-elected as the former vice president acknowledges that the president demanded he violate the Constitution or be hung by Trump’s most violent sycophants…As his own Republican toadies scampered for cover and condemned his call to “fight like hell” that brought the worst of his followers to the second storming of the Capital, Trump relished in the glory of people willing to kill, or die, for him, not because he cared a whit for any of them but because he cared too much for himself…if you have chosen fantasy over reality, and want desperately enough to believe in the absurd excuses constructed around January 6th, so be it. Time will judge Trump’s administration. Time will judge Trump, the vulgar, deceitful, amoral, narcissistic ignoramus. But January 6th happened.

Yikes.

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Ethics Hero: VP Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Harris has had, in my estimation, several opportunities to earn Ethics Hero status here in the past, and whiffed every time. Yesterday, she achieved that status by the easiest route imaginable: by simply doing her job, indeed one of the very few requirements of a job that has always been under-burdened by official duties.

Vice-President Harris officiated as the two houses of Congress met in joint session to formally count the Electoral College votes for President and certify the results. “The votes for president of the United States are as follows,” Harris declared, as she was bound to, after each state’s totals were read. “Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes.” When Republican members of Congress rose to their feet to applaud, Harris managed to look non-committal, even if she might have been thinking, “Fuck you all.”

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‘Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!’ An Unethical Quote and an Exposé

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Ethics Alarms made it clear, I hope, that one reason I believed that it was crucial for Donald Trump to win the election was to decisively foil the news media’s attempt to defeat him through relentless unethical journalism. To be honest, I sometimes think, like right now, that this was even more important than rejecting the nascent and sometimes not-so-nascent totalitarianism of the 21st Century Democratic Party and the American Left. It is now clear to even the most die-hard propagandists masquerading as “independent journalists” that the mask is off, the jig is up, and all but the most gullible and ignorant of the American public don’t trust them any more. That’s wonderful, but if reform is on the horizon, it’s barely detectable.

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Snow Day Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Yet another episode of “It’s Hell Being an Ethicist…

It’s a snow day in the D.C. area. Most stores are closed, and most workers are taking the day off. For families with young kids it’s unavoidable: schools around here close with even a prediction of snow. For someone born and bred in New England, this phobia over the white stuff seems especially ludicrous; there are maybe five inches on the ground right now, and in Boston, that would not even slow traffic down, much less close schools. It took at least a two or three feet of snow to close the schools when I was a nubbin.

Still, the old memories are bright. A snow day was always marked by a nice fire in the fireplace, hot cocoa, playing board games with my sister and, of course, dressing warm and going sledding. Today is a snow day. But I have a home office and no excuse not to work—even though I worked all weekend, even though everything in my mind and body is saying, “Take it easy! This is one of life’s special joys! It’s a respite from responsibility! Give yourself a break—heck, everybody else is doing it!“

Ah, but that last part, the Golden Rationalization, is like a splash ice water in the puss. I see the chart of “The Six Pillars of Character” on the wall, and “diligence” is staring at me. So is “responsibility,” and “prudence.” I’m behind in so many things, and there is so much I need to finish, then more still after I finish that. Snow days are about being carefree and having fun. I can’t remember the last time I had fun.

I want a snow day; I deserve a snow day. A snow day would be good for me.

But I’m an ethicist, and I have to be consistent: “Integrity ” is staring at me now. I have to work. No snow day for me.

Fuck.

January 6 Should Live in Infamy, But Not For The Reasons Democrats and the News Media Are Telling Us Today [Updated!]

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The true significance of January 6 is that the response of the Biden Administration and the Democrats in Congress to a demonstration that turned into a riot was a virtual flare warning Americans that our government and one of its two major parties are flirting with totalitarianism. The aftermath also sent a clear, if distorted by, again, the news media, message that a double standard exists in law enforcement, encouraged and nourished by the the totalitarian-trending Left.

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Unethical Interview Exchange Of The Decade: “Meet the Press” and Senator Schumer

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

And this kind of thing is why I stopped watching Sunday Morning public events shows more than a decade ago. The disgraceful exchange, on “Meet the Press,” which has fallen apart in chunks since its glory days with Tim Russert:

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States Are Running Unethical Numbers Rackets That Take From The Poor, Legalized Casino Gambling Is Spreading Gambling Addictions Across The Land, Legalized Online “Gaming” Threatens The Integrity Of Our Sports, And What Do Democrats Want To Ban?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Betting on elections!

Brilliant.

U.S. Reps. Andrea Salinas (D-Oregon) and the reliably absurd Jamie Raskin, (D-Md), introduced a bill in Congress last month mirroring a bill introduced by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), earlier in 2024, to prohibit election wagering. It’s called the “Ban Gambling on Elections Act.”

“Betting on elections degrades them from an investment in leadership to a profit-maximizing game,” Merkley said in a statement. “In addition, this practice is corrupt since those betting can influence the outcome by funding late-cycle smear campaigns. It’s like betting on a baseball game when you control the umpire. It’s a great step forward to have House leaders like Rep. Raskin and Congresswoman Salinas take on this fight.”

No, it’s moronic. One can hardly get addicted to election wagering: first, the pay-offs aren’t very big, and second, big elections only come along every two years. Unlike any other form of gambling, the election wagering actually conveys useful information: due to the “wisdom of crowds,” the betting tends to be more accurate in predicting outcomes than polls. The idea that anyone would spend money to fund a “smear campaign” to win an election bet is so bonkers it doesn’t even warrant a rebuttal.

In contrast, banning state lotteries would do some real good; finding ways to dial back casino gambling and online gambling would also save families and marriages from ruin. Slot machines are licenses to steal. So, of course, these three Democrats choose the least harmful and sinister of all gambling platforms to grandstand over. I can’t figure out what motivated this nonsense. Are the Democrats mad at the betting sites because they predicted Trump’s win?

I’m betting their bill rolls snake-eyes.

Political Cartoon Ethics: Talk About Picking The Wrong Hill To Die On!

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

Ann Telnaes, “a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist” (So what?) for The Washington Post, announced that she was resigning after editors rejected a cartoon depicting WaPo’s owner, Jeff Bezos, genuflecting toward a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump.

On her substack, Telnaes called the newspaper’s decision to kill her cartoon a “game changer” that was “dangerous for a free press.”

Riiight. The cartoon shows Jeff Bezos and other media figures prostrating themselves to Trump, which is not only untrue, it’s juvenile. That cartoon could have been published in a middle school newspaper. The Post has had a succession of knee-jerk, shrill progressive scolds as political cartoonists in an unbroken line since the partisan-biased Herb Block was also a “Pulitzer Prize winner”—- you know, like the Post was for its false reporting on the Russian Collusion hoax. Like Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times were Pulitzered for creating the anti-America propaganda screed called “The 1619 Project.”

Ethics Alarms has long maintained that political cartoons don’t warrant presence on editorial pages because 90% of them or more communicate grade-school level political sophistication through the jaundiced eyes of artists lacking education, perspective and critical thinking skills. That drawing above illustrates the Ethics Alarms position nicely.

Telnaes is throwing a hissy-fit because she isn’t allowed to publish an obnoxious and simple-minded cartoon—it also isn’t remotely funny—attacking her employer with a cheap shot. The Trump-Deranged, progressives and Democrats on the Post—that is, 98% of the staff, were triggered because Bezos chose not to have his paper endorse Kamala Harris, the worst candidate a major party has run for President since, oh, maybe Horace Greeley in 1872, except that Horace was smarter than Kamala and he never waffled on his positions, which were a matter of record.

It would be a different if the cartoon the artist is so determined to see promoted was interesting, trenchant, original or clever, but it isn’t. The baseball equivalent would be a .216 hitting player quitting his team because the manager chose to leave him off the line-up card.

Ethics Quote of the Week: “Victory Girls” Blogger Nina Bookout

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“This sentencing decision by Merchan is, in my opinion, based upon pure spite.”

—-Nina Bookout, one of several conservative female pundits who populate the “Victory Girls” blog, correctly assessing the planned conclusion of one of the many contrived “lawfare” cases against Donald Trump that ultimately failed at their mission, which was to stop him from returning to the White House even at the price of emulating totalitarian regimes.

Gee, ya think, Nina?

There has been a lot of spite emanating from the Angry (and justly humiliated) Left lately, with Biden giving civilian honors to the likes of Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. The latter, among other revolting uses of his billions, funded anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas/pro-terrorism demonstrations on college campuses. Bookout’s particular focus regarding spite is New York’s Judge Merchan ruling last week that President-Elect Trump will be sentenced on January 10, less the two week from his swearing in as POTUS. Merchan also made it clear that the sentence will include no jail time, an “unconditional discharge,” which is what New York criminal courts call a non-jail and non-probation sentence that carries no other obligations.

The objective, Bookout surmises, is so the resistance, Democrats and the corrupted mainstream media (the cabal that Ethics Alarms refers to with the term, “The Axis of Unethical Conduct, or “Axis” for short) can continue to deride Trump as a “convicted felon” and the “first U.S. President to be convicted of a felony.”

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